3

Interrogating Difference:
Postcolonial Perspectives in
Architecture and Urbanism
Jyoti Hosagrahar

INTRODUCTION values, policies, operations, and identities.

They acknowledge instead the multiple
Postcolonial perspectives in architecture and dimensions of subordinate experiences. In so
urbanism offer ways of thinking about built doing, postcolonial perspectives
form and space as cultural landscapes that particularize universal narratives and
are at once globally interconnected and pre- globalize narrowly parochial ones.
cisely situated in space and time. With intel-
Postcolonial scholarship began in the
lectual roots in the struggles against Western
1950s as a fiercely political opposition to
European colonization of Asia and Africa in
colonial rule: giving voice to the oppressed,
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
while exposing the violence and brutality of
much of the scholarship has focused on the
those in power. Scathing indictments against
global South that has been disdained or mar-
oppression critiqued the complex and insidi-
ginalized in received literature. Postcolonial
ous ways in which colonialism operated
thought questions the dominance of univer-
and the corrosive impacts it had on people
salizing paradigms and simplistic categori-
and their landscapes – producing a condition
zations in conventional scholarship in
that the French anthropologist, Georges
architecture and urbanism focused on
Balandier spoke of as ‘the Colonial
Western Europe and North America.
Situation’ (1966 [1955]). Although a crude
Dichotomies such as those between West
and violent assertion of control over passive
and non-West, traditional and modern, have
subjects has been all too prevalent in colonial
persisted as rigid oppositions that deny both
circumstances, postcolonial scholars have
the interdepend- ence and the inequalities in
recognized power as a complex and all-
the relationship. Postcolonial perspectives
encompassing web of relationships that
challenge the notion of a universal
operates in space to control people’s
modernism that privileges those in positions
behavior, relationships, and identi- ties. As
of power and authority, legitimating their
Ashis Nandy (1988 [1983]) has explained so
right to define fundamental
well, the historical inequalities
 INTERROGATING DIFFERENCE
and cultural domination have been such that
the indigenous identity must contend with its
subjectification as its ‘intimate enemy.’
The intellectual discourse of postcolonial
critique and affirmation extended from the
social sciences to philosophy, film, and
other art forms. Using the language, tools,
and tropes of the colonizers to highlight
experiences and perspectives other than
the dominant ones, the subordinate and the
marginalized spoke back to power, and in
the process, decentred their discourse. Thus
postcolonial thought as an intellectual per-
spective is not so much the result of a chron-
ological sequence of events after
colonialism as it is a way of thinking about
the relation- ship between a dominant power
and its sub- jects under colonialism.
Postcolonial perspectives in architecture
and urbanism do not form a well-defined
body of knowledge or a fixed set of stylistic
tropes even today. While historical, geo-
graphical, and cultural distinctions are para-
mount, the influences come from a variety
of disciplines as well. It is, as yet, a dynamic
approach that does not have a clear or
agreed upon beginning, boundary, or path.
Some scholars define postcolonial studies as
pre- cisely focused on European
colonization of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Others have a wider view that
now includes the experiences of nations that
have never been colonized, such as Turkey;
the repercussions of earlier colonization in
Latin America; recent imperialism such as
those by the US, Japan, or the USSR; as
well as the multiple effects of colonial
experiences on Europe and the US. In its
broadest definition, post- colonial
perspectives give voice to all types and sites
of struggles against hegemonic power. Its
challenge is in legitimizing, ena- bling, and
empowering alternative narratives and
forms. Many critical readings about
domination based on gender, race, caste,
ethnic, or religious groups, could thus be
subsumed under postcolonial thought.
In this chapter, I adopt a middle ground.
I argue for an intellectual decolonization,
71
an active rejection of spaces and discourses
based in hegemonic dualities: a realm that is
neither so broad as to include every type
of critical perspective under its umbrella nor
so narrow as to exclude any interpretations
that do not pertain specifically to Western
European colonialism. Through writing and
theorizing, but equally through design and
planning interventions, postcolonial theory
has relocated discussions of modernity to
marginalized locales and emphasized the
interplay of culture and power in imagining,
producing, and experiencing the built envi-
ronment. This chapter considers writing
within the broad realm of postcolonial per-
spectives as well as critical practices with
similar objectives. I also include the work of
scholars from a variety of fields other than
architecture who have influenced thinking
about built form and space. A wealth of
schol- arship has emerged in recent years
that high- lights the distinctive experiences
and histories of specific regions. Given my
personal expe- rience, research, and practice,
this chapter emphasizes scholarship and
examples from South Asia more than other
regions. It begins with a discussion of the
key intellectual issues and concerns of
postcolonial theory. I will then focus on four
topics of critical impor- tance:
historiography and representation,
nationalism and nationhood; globalization;
and preservation and cultural identity. This
leads to a discussion of postcolonial themes
in recent design practice, seen across a broad
geographical and cultural terrain. At a time
when sustainability is an urgent global con-
cern, postcolonial theory becomes especially
important in giving salience to the global–
local interconnections to address equity,
access, and environmental resources.
KEY IDEAS AND INTELLECTUAL
INFLUENCE
The first and still most admired writer in this
field was the philosopher and revolutionary,
Frantz Fanon best known for his book, The
Wretched of the Earth (2004 [1961]). Fanon,
born in Martinique and educated in Paris,
was a vocal critic of France’s colonization
of Algeria while it was still a colony. He
denounced the psychopathology of colonial-
ism and warned of possible violence in the
aftermath of national independence strug-
gles. Fanon’s powerful work on race and
colonialism inspired and influenced anti-
colonial liberation movements for decades.
Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) was a
seminal work that further shaped the land-
scape of postcolonial thought. His brilliant
literary exegesis of learned Orientalist
scholars shows how they created the very
idea of the mysterious ‘Orient’. They
disdained all indig- enous scholars as
inevitably biased and paro- chial; bestowing
interpretive authority of major historical texts
to outside experts. Said con- tended that this
axis of knowledge and power still affects
every realm of modern life across the world.
Along with other scholars, Said’s work
showed how identities were culturally
constructed rather than inherent characteris-
tics. Said thus led the way for later critical
theorists to read architecture and urban
spaces, both historical and contemporary, as
cultural documents that could reveal hidden
biases.
In Said’s work, as well as in that of many
other postcolonial thinkers, Michel Foucault
emerged as an important theoretical influ-
ence. Foucault challenged established
notions about the relationship between
culture, power, and knowledge (see also
Chapters 1 and 2). His ‘networks of power’
identified cultural practices that served to
dominate in ways that went far beyond
direct acts of physical aggression including
architectural spaces that worked as
‘machines for the control of the self’. His
analysis of the all- encompassing panoptic
controls of prisons and asylums as well as
his notion of hetero- topias as ‘other’ spaces
that allowed people to step briefly outside
the expected norms of behaviour were
concepts especially important to architecture
(Foucault 1977; 2008).
The 1980s saw revisionist thinking in the
humanities and social sciences that included
a growing coterie of non-Western intellectu-
als, many of whom had been trained in uni-
versities in the West. The Subaltern Studies
Collective, started in the mid-1980s, marked
a dramatic move into the global intellectual
terrain. Speaking from and on particular
landscapes of South Asia, they challenged
conventional histories of colonized or sub-
ject populations with ‘histories from below’
that presented various non-elite populations
as active agents of social and economic
change.1 Ranajit Guha, Gyan Pandey, Partha
Chatterjee, Gyan Prakash, and Gayatri
Spivak have been among the most prominent
mem- bers of the Collective (Guha and
Spivak 1988; Guha 1997). Strongly
influenced by Marx and Gramsci, the work
of this group has sought out the experiences
of marginal- ized people. The significance of
their work to architecture and urbanism has
been twofold. First in legitimizing ‘other’
histories that are non-Eurocentric and
making visible people and landscapes that
received accounts had been blind to; and
second in recognizing the subtle ways in
which even the most margin- alized
populations actively shape and negoti- ate
the spaces they inhabit.
Race was a central aspect of Western
Europe’s colonization of Asia and Africa,
making racial difference an important
aspect of postcolonial analysis. Focusing on
questions of power and identity, scholars
have probed the positive and negative self-
conceptions of diverse groups within a larger
and/or hostile society (Appiah and Gates
1995; Hall and du Gay 1996). Literary
critics like Henry Louis Gates (2006) have
pointed out the cultural prejudices inherent
in literary theory, arguing that black
American literature should be evaluated on
the criteria of its origin rather than measured
against Eurocentric literary canon. Contrary
to such a view of a black cultural aesthetic
has been Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (2003)
cri- tique of Afrocentrism as a mirror image
of Eurocentrism and equally preoccupied
with ancient histories. These varied
commentaries on the constructions of black
culture and African-ness have had a
profound impact on
identity politics. For architecture and urban-
ism, such debates have raised questions
about subjective experience and cultural
rela- tivity of aesthetics in architecture and
urban- ism as opposed to supposedly
objective and universal measures for their
evaluation.
Colonial anxieties about purity of opposi-
tional categories such as black and white,
colonizer and colonized, modern and tradi-
tional were countered by ever increasing
forms of hybridity as new ideas, people,
images, and capital moved around the world
with greater frequency. Transnationalism
and interconnectedness meant increasingly
‘impure’ mixtures of diverse, supposedly
con- tradictory, even forbidden elements, or
exper- imentation driven by the desire to
find new kinds of strength and beauty. Homi
Bhabha (1994) has recognized the
unpredictability of hybridization, the
impossibility of total con- trol as itself a
source of power. Bhabha’s intricate view of
hybridity and infiltration of cultural
symbols, values, and practices and his
emphasis on identities as heterogeneous
provide an understanding of multiple,
contra- dictory, and fluid modern identities.
The grand history of Europe had for dec-
ades been equated with the universal history
of humankind and many have continued to
accept accounts of a linear and universal
modern originating from Western Europe and
disseminating to other places. Postcolonial
intellectuals have been instrumental in offer-
ing complex readings of modernity and
mod- ernism from the margins. Arjun
Appadurai (1996) has been immensely
influential with his work on modernity and
globalization (discussed in greater detail
later in this chap- ter). In his recent book,
Provincializing Europe (2007), Dipesh
Chakrabarty has addressed the idea of
Europe not as a specific geographical region
but as the mythical site of the original
modern. His effort to provin- cialize Europe
is not to reject the legacy of Enlightenment
thought that he considers indispensable to a
social critique of justice and equity but to
de-centre the mythical Europe by looking at
the many Europes from the margins.
Addressing global interconnections, local
experience, and visual difference, postcolo-
nial approaches in architecture and urbanism
look far beyond form, function, and style. In
depicting particular places as international
and cosmopolitan as well as local and pro-
vincial, postcolonial critics do not dismiss
the commonalities of modernism but have
highlighted the uneasy negotiation between
sameness and difference in particular
locales. Postcolonial theory has informed
thinking about buildings and urban space as
symbolic cultural landscapes that are
historically con- stituted, culturally
constructed, political arti- facts whose forms
are dynamic and meanings constantly
negotiated.
HISTORIOGRAPHY AND
REPRESENTATION
From Vitruvius to Venturi, architectural
theory has relied on a particular set of
historical premises and examples that were
considered universal even though they were
rooted in the experiences and intellectual
traditions of Western Europe and North
America. This Eurocentric canon looked
down on all other cultures, dismissing their
architecture as static, backward, or
‘decadent’.
Postcolonial thought questions the
received canon of European architectural
history as the only history of architecture and
is also critical of a linear history that traces
the ‘progress’ of architecture from primitive
to modern. One genre of writing has
critiqued the ways that design and policy
reinforced established identities and
relationships of power and also looked at
interventions in the colonies. In The Politics
of Design in French Colonial Urbanism
(1991), Gwendolyn Wright has analysed
design strategies in France and in three
French colonies (Morocco, Indochina, and
Madagascar) from the 1880s through to the
1930s. Seemingly antagonistic design
strategies – historic preservation, contextual
design, and a highly rationalized modernism
– all served imperial goals.
Highlighting the overarching and particular
histories of different colonies, she has also
emphasized the significance of this imagery
at home to promote tourism and public sup-
port for the colonialist project. In An
Imperial Vision (1989), Thomas Metcalf has
looked at architecture as a symbolic
representation of British power in India and
as an instrument for articulating cultural
difference.
Another genre of postcolonial inquiry has
focused on the conflicts, negotiations, and
experiences of different groups of subordi-
nate populations in response to dominant
interventions to control and define identities.
Historiography in this mode of inquiry has
used eclectic sources to piece together narra-
tives from the other side. For instance, my
study of nineteenth century Delhi
(Hosagrahar 2005) showed that Indians
appropriated neo- classical elements into
traditional building fronts, negotiated the
limits of Haussman-ic clearances of dense
urban neighborhoods, and subverted
colonial building regulations to transform
the city into one that was both traditional
and modern. Accounts of defiance and
negotiation by those in the margins
destabilize the singular authority of those in
power. Through form, use, and meaning,
architecture and built form have contributed
to imagining and constructing identities.
Some scholars have critically examined the
ways that those in authority have used space
to define oppositional identities to reinforce
their position of power. Others have
explored the ways these enforced and
essentialized identities have been contested
and negotiated by subordinate groups.
Timothy Mitchell’s Colonising Egypt
(1988), a seminal work, critically examines
Europe’s encounter with the Orient, the pre-
conceptions and perceptions on both sides.
In his insightful analysis of the representa-
tion of Cairo at the World’s Fair in Paris in
1889, Mitchell has argued that colonial dis-
plays affected Western perceptions of urban
life, especially in the colonies, creating an
artificial vantage (‘the-world-as-exhibition’)
that combined sensual pleasures with the
assurance of safety. Zeynep Çelik (1992)
later accentuated the gendered aspect of
these displays of the non-West that further
reinforced power relations between the colo-
nizers and the colonized.
The colonial construction of difference
was premised on the purity of the opposing
groups: colonizer and colonized, Orient and
Occident, modern and traditional. The real-
ity, however, was always much muddier.
Some postcolonial histories have reversed
this ideal of purity to look at hybrids.
Anthony King (1976) initiated this approach
early in his career, analyzing British
cantonments in India as a hybrid ‘third
culture’: neither entirely British nor entirely
indigenous. A subsequent book, The
Bungalow (1984) fol- lowed the
development of a house form from its
humble origins as rural hut in Bengal
through its many colonial avatars in South
and Southeast Asia to its incarnation as a
‘cozy’ middle-class house in the United States.
This book showed architecture as a global
project in which the buildings and forms that
developed in one place influenced those in
another, weaving as it did themes of preju-
dice and exoticism, visibility and invisibility
into a complex narrative. Other recent
studies have also regarded the seemingly
dichoto- mous categories such as ‘colonizer’
and ‘colonized’, or ‘modern’ and
‘traditional’ as fluid and shifting, seeking
out areas of hybridity, ambivalence, and
crossing over of cultures. In emphasizing
interconnections and infiltrations, they have
highlighted the active engagement of the
subordinate groups in the making of their
landscapes and identi- ties. Swati
Chattopadhyay’s (2005) interpre- tation of
colonial Calcutta, for example, has offered
valuable insights into the way the Bengali
middle-class appropriated the forms and
tropes of the colonizer to increase their own
authority and status.
Against the notion of a singular Western
modernity imposed on the world, scholars
increasingly advocate the concept of multi-
ple, overlapping, and incomplete moderni-
ties. This in turn precludes simplistic
characterization of forms and meanings (see
for instance Morton 2000). Postcolonial
 thought is not about a rejection of European
modernism. Rather, it necessarily engages
with modernist universals and the dis-
courses of European intellectual traditions.
Acknowledging these as a global heritage,
postcolonial perspectives make sense of this
heritage from and for the margins.
Postcolonial theories have created modulated
terms to describe the multiplicities of
modern life and, to a lesser extent, its
hierarchies. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar
(1999) speaks of ‘alternative modernities,’
and Gyan Prakash (1999) of ‘divided
modernities.’ Lu in this volume (Chapter
13) underscores complex, impure
interconnections with ‘entangled
modernities.’ Such phrases challenge the
received canon that puts Europe at the centre,
rejecting adaptations and secondary gestures
toward multiculturalism or ‘global openness’.
In fact, all modernities are indigenized
interpretations of an imagined ideal. This is
why I titled my book Indigenous Modernities
(Hosagrahar 2005). Rejecting the notion of an
alternative to the dominant and single notion
of modern, I hold that all modernities are
indigenized interpretations of an imagined
ideal. The concept of ‘indigenous moderni-
ties’ recognizes and legitimizes a multiplicity
of ‘other’ experiences of modern life, its spa-
tial forms and cultural expressions, as being
on a par with conventional ones. And
Western Europe moderns too, are localized
indigenous
realizations of a mythical ideal.
Postcolonial perspectives not only glo-
balize local histories and provincialize histo-
ries masquerading as global but have also
informed global comparisons. For those con-
vinced that particular European architectural
histories are the only histories of architec-
ture, the canonized built forms are, by
defini- tion, complete, autonomous, and
universal. In this view, the built forms of
other places, especially in the colonies and
ex-colonies, are dependent and place
specific and hence not worthy subjects of
historical inquiry. Nineteenth-century
European historians pre- sumed they were
presenting a global perspec- tive. Even
today, few European or American historians
pause to ask how colonial histories
might have affected Western aesthetic ideals
and hierarchies.
Early histories of modern architecture,
notably Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and
Architecture (1967 [1941]) glorified a teleol-
ogy that showed modernism emerging
trium- phant from western architectural
history. Giedion gave considerable attention
to the US as well as Europe, but virtually
ignored non-Western cultures. Later
editions, and a plethora of similar histories
of modernism that soon followed,
occasionally added non- Western sites
designed by European and North American
‘masters’. Mark Jarzombek and
Vikramaditya Prakash offer a valuable
counterpoint to the architectural histories of
Bannister Fletcher and Giedeon in A Global
History of Architecture (Ching et al. 2006).
In order to the emphasize the connections,
contrasts, and influences in architectural
movements throughout history, this book
organizes 5000 years of architectural history
on a global timeline from pre-history to the
present.
Postcolonial perspectives, however, have
not yet managed to dominate the teaching
of architectural history, as became clear
from a special series of issues of the
Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians (2002–2003). The series
highlighted how the primacy of European
monuments and narra- tive of stylistic
development still remains the central
architectural canon almost every- where. It
was also apparent that local archi- tectural
histories and building traditions received
short shrift in comparison. Sibel Bozdogan
(2001), Gülsüm Baydar (1998), and I
(Hosagrahar 2002) have each pointed out the
Orientalist bias in the canonical histo- ries of
architecture. In recent years, ‘non- Western’
intellectuals teaching in architecture schools
in North America and Australia (many of
whose writings are discussed in this chapter)
have brought postcolonial critique and
transformations to bear on the teaching of
grand European histories of architecture – so
it is well possible that the coming years will
see a serious shift in dominant teaching
topics and methods.
NATIONALISM AND NATIONS
The emergence of nations in the twentieth
century has been a matter of much debate
among scholars (see also Chapters 11 and
12). The works of Benedict Anderson (1999
[1985]) and Partha Chatterjee (1993) have led
the way. Anderson described how nations
were ‘imag- ined’ into existence rather than
teleologically determined by language or
religion. Chatterjee has pointed out how
nations were cobbled together from colonies
and imagined into existence by colonizers in
their efforts at empire building and later by
nationalists. Military conquest and European
geopolitical competition shaped national
boundaries regardless of the diversity of
indigenous groups they encompassed,
creating among citizens fragmented loyalties
between modern nations and other forms of
traditional communities.
Architectural styles had historically
played an instrumental role in visualizing
national identities in Western Europe. For
the Western European colonizers building in
the colonies, the choice of style was
deliberate. In addition to displaying the
authority of the empire, they carefully
sought to construct narratives of difference
between what they saw as the enlightened
colonizers and the primitive, decadent, and
despotic colonized. The newly independent
nations also used architecture in their search
for a national identity in their own terms.
They rebelled against a colonial
characterization of their societies as primi-
tive and backward, and at the same time did
not want to cast themselves in the mould of
the colonizers whose forms they identified
with oppression. The literature suggests that
the anxiety to visually express the identity of
the new nation as both modern and unique in
its heritage resulted in four types of
responses.
First, the rise of anti-imperialist
movements during the twentieth century
often fuelled the idea of reclaiming (or
constructing) a pristine and idealized
precolonial past rejecting architectural forms
associated with Western Europe and Greek
and Roman classicism. For instance, in her
study of modern nation
building in Turkey and its complicated rela-
tionship with an Ottoman past, Sibel
Bozdogan (2001) has showed how the archi-
tects such as Sedad Eldem served as key
figures in the new republic responsible for
creating a ‘Turkish’ identity that made refer-
ences to a vernacular Anatolian heritage.
A second response has been for the nation to
portray itself as a global modern by inviting
acknowledged ‘masters’ of modern architec-
ture in Western Europe and North America
to construct iconic symbols in the
International Style such as in Chandigarh
and Dacca. Vikramaditya Prakash’s (2002)
critical study of Le Corbusier’s design of
Chandigarh has explicated a newly
independent India’s struggle to define itself
as a leader in science and technology. He has
shown the ways the conflicting views and
imaginations of key figures, political
ideologies, and urban processes were
negotiated to construct the modernist
narrative of the nation and shape the
seemingly global form of the city. A third
response has been more fragmented.
Changing nationalist agendas and narratives
can lead to a diversity of architectural and
urban preferences, that each mediate in a
different way the construction of national
identity (see for instance Kusno 2000 about
Indonesia). Finally, in recent years, design
interventions by high profile designers from
Western Europe and North America in places
that had hitherto been relegated as tradi-
tional have helped to establish their national
identity as significant players in a globalized
world. Architects recognized as global stars
have moved ‘the margins’ to transform them
into museums of architectural wonder or
laboratories for architectural experimenta-
tion. Iconic buildings such as those by
Herzog and de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas
in Beijing, Norman Foster’s design for the
sustainable city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi,
and Arup’s technological and planning
wonder in the eco-city of Dongtan in China
are examples of such projects that have been
instrumental in building new identities for
these nations.
Citizenship is a concept related integrally
to nationhood – loyalty and allegiance to an
imagined community in return for the rights
of legitimate membership. Going far beyond
received notions of modern nation-states as
the principal domain of citizenship, scholars
have examined the complexity of citizenship
and multiple allegiances in the context of
transnational migration, recent trends in glo-
balization as well as the growing importance
of cities. Essays in a collection edited by
James Holston, Cities and Citizenship
(1999), have pointed to the crucial
significance of the right to reside in the
renegotiating of cities, democracy, and new
alignments of local and global identity. The
absence of citizenship or the systematic
denial of it to some people significantly
marginalizes them. From refu- gee camps
and shelters of those fleeing war and ethnic
persecution to the vast landscapes of slums,
scholars have highlighted the urban spaces
of illegitimacy, appropriation, and
informality where the hegemony of their
marginal identities are reproduced and con-
tested (Roy and Al Sayyad 2004).
PRESERVATION AND CULTURAL
IDENTITY
As visualizations of inherited values and
histories, preservation of cultural heritage
takes centre stage in discussion of identity
(see also Chapter 17). Western European
notions of preservation, when transported to
the colonies, rationalized the assertion of
power and a single linear historical account
that reinforced colonial hierarchies.
Colonial officials appropriated the right to
classify heritage structures and define which
monuments were worthy of preservation as
artistic representations of a people and their
identity. The British in India glorified
ancient history as part of a narrative of early
glory and medieval decline justifying British
impe- rialism that promised to guide India
once again to the glory that was (Hosagrahar
2002). For the French in North Africa, preser-
vation of the medina of cities like Rabat,
Fez, and Tunis, frozen and timeless,
juxtaposed
against modernist urban improvements in
the new developments outside the walled
city, articulated the identity of one as a place
of decadence and the other as one of
progress (Beguin et al. 1983; Abu-Lughod
1980;
Wright 1991; Hamadeh 1992).
For modernists seeking the comforting
binary of traditional and modern, an imag-
ined ‘authenticity’ is of central concern. Any
signs of modernity in heritage places they
dismiss as signs of ‘failure’,
‘incompleteness’, and ‘in-authenticity’. Such
pictorializing of heritage and tradition to
give it visual appeal has often been at the
cost of locals compro- mising their needs
and even excluding resi- dents from
inhabiting and using certain parts of the city.
The process of constructing exotic and
picturesque heritage has, at times, falsi- fied
a place. Not only does it disallow mod-
ernization and change but it also selectively
preserves or reconstructs those elements that
enhance an image of the place as belonging
to another epoch.
Perhaps nowhere has the process of con-
structing a medieval city been a more insidi-
ous and deliberate a project than in Cairo.
As the authors of Making Cairo Medieval
(Al Sayyad et al. 2005) have observed, art
historians, architects, urban planners,
conser- vationists, literary writers, and
travellers together constructed an identity of
the old city of Cairo as ‘medieval’. The
process involved selective restoration and
rehabi- litation to shape the city forms to fit
the imagined ideal: a dual operation that
simulta- neously modernized and
medievalized Cairo. Remaking Cairo as
medieval served both the Western European
powers that partially colo- nized Egypt as
well as nationalist goals.
Tourism has been an important driver for
commodifying and marketing heritage.
Selectively preserving, reconstructing, and
controlling activities have served to make
historic settings exotic and picturesque in
Asia, Africa, and Latin America, raising
the question, as the collection Consuming
Tradition (Al Sayyad 2001) does, of who
decides what kind of change is acceptable
in historic landscapes. Falsification and
exaggeration in pictorializing heritage places
are equally prevalent in North America
where Michael Sorkin (1996) has pointed
out that they are comparable to theme parks
for entertainment.
A discussion of heritage sites raises
impor- tant questions of what gets
designated as heritage, by whom, and which
identities are privileged. The designation of
architecturally unremarkable places as
important landmarks in specific histories
and communities recog- nizes subordinate
histories. Aapravasi Ghat in Mauritius was
inscribed as a World Heritage Site by
UNESCO in 2006. It was the landing place
during much of the nine- teenth and early
twentieth century for almost half a million
indentured labourers arriving from India to
work in the sugar plantations of Mauritius,
or other places in the British Empire. As
such, it has strong associations in the
memories of the indentured labourers and
their families. Transnational populations in
historic cities, like North Africans in Paris,
or South Asians in Leicester, prompted in
part by the intertwined histories of the two
regions, have necessitated the rethinking of
a single authentic identity of a place to
become instead an ongoing historical
account.
One aspect of preservation that remains a
dilemma for many cities in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America, is the absence of clear dis-
tinctions between traditional built forms and
informal ones. While officials intervene to
preserve vernacular settlements identified as
traditional; informal settlements have often
been the target of clearances. Although many
have observed continuities of settlement
patterns between neighborhoods in historic
cities and squatter settlements, the latter
have been considered as urban problems and
plan- ning failures.
GLOBALIZATION
From a postcolonial perspective, globaliza-
tion does not appear as a determining force
that has flattened out other urban processes,
but rather as a phenomenon producing flows
of capital, goods, labour, and information
that forcefully shape the forms of specific
cities and neighbourhoods and leaves others
behind, reproducing in new ways the global
inequalities and dependencies of colonial-
ism. Anthony King (1990) was one of the
earliest to make connections between mod-
ernization, the continuing interdependencies
between the ex-colonial powers of Western
Europe and the colonies in Asia and Africa,
and the formation of global cities, cultures,
and spaces. King began by tracing the con-
nections between urbanism, colonialism, and
the world economy further, developing
Wallerstein’s theories of the world-
economic system. King emphasized cultural
and spatial dimensions, showing how
contemporary patterns of globalization have
historical roots in the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century colonialism of Asia and
Africa. Thus, cities like London, New York,
and Tokyo have become internationalized
spatially and demo- graphically as well as
economically with ethnic enclaves,
transnational communities, and spaces of
global culture (King 2004).
Arjun Appadurai’s work (1996; 2001) has
been immensely influential in the under-
standing of the cultural experience of moder-
nity and globalization. Two aspects of his
work have been key. First is his engagement
with image, media, and representation as
social practices in the global cultural proc-
esses that highlight the role of fantasy in
the making of the new global order. He
has alerted us to the ways that the imaginar-
ies collapse accepted separations between
subject and object, resonating with the post-
modernist view of the fragmented visual
experience. Second, is Appadurai’s contribu-
tion, along with Carol Breckenridge and the
journal, Public Culture they co-founded, to
understanding transnationalism and public
culture. Together, they have been incredibly
important in bringing to the fore cultural
transformations in cities through investiga-
tions of a wide range of everyday appropria-
tions and interpretations of power and
identity in the city, from the terrorist attack
in Mumbai
to the football clubs of Buenos Aires.
Another related initiative of Appadurai, a
non-profit, Partners for Urban Knowledge,
Action and Research (PUKAR), has been
valuable in viewing Mumbai as a conceptual
base and laboratory to investigate cultural
forms of globalization.2
Other postcolonial approaches have
emphasized the broader regional and trans-
national dynamics that have shaped particu-
lar places. In a collection edited by Gyan
Prakash and Kevin Kruse (2008), the
authors, focusing on expanding urban
networks, have argued that cities like
Johannesburg and Vienna were shaped by
the particular histo- ries of their global
engagements. Sheila Crane’s essay in their
collection, for instance, has interpreted the
colonial and postcolonial histories of
Marseilles and Algiers not as self-contained
entities but as interconnected forms shaped
by similar forces. Nuanced readings of
corporate landscapes emerging from the new
globalization have emphasized the
heterogeneity within the apparently homo-
genous monoculture of global cityscapes.
Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi for
instance, have focused on imaginaries in
the construction of corporate towers for
multinational corporations in their book,
Multi-National City (2007).
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century coloni-
alism resulted in global movements of
people in addition to goods and ideas. South
Asians in Malaysia, Singapore, the
Caribbean, and the UK; and North Africans
and Vietnamese in France, among others,
formed immigrant and diasporic
communities. The struggles of these
subordinate groups to cope with
environments that were sometimes hostile
and segregated defined the identities of the
communities and their spaces. Equally sig-
nificant are critical readings of the cosmo-
politan transnationalism of cities like Los
Angeles (Davis 2000) or Hong Kong (Abbas
1997).
Global flows of architects, design con-
cepts, technologies, and materials from
Western Europe and North America to the
countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
have resulted in new conceptualizations
of globalized architectural practices where
ideas and innovation are considered the pur-
view of architectural schools and practices
in Western Europe and North America, while
drawings and detailing are subcontracted
to specialized agencies in India and China
(see Chapter 22). Jeffrey Cody’s Exporting
American Architecture (2003) has provided
rich insights into architectural importation
in China, looking at the global-local interac-
tions and the technologies of production
even in discussions of ordinary buildings
and neighborhoods. The Harvard Design
School Project on the City directed by Rem
Koolhaas has explored urbanism in rapidly
urbanizing metropolises as a global
phenomenon with particular forms in each
place including the Pearl River Delta in
China (Chung et al. 2001) and Lagos,
Nigeria (Koolhaas 2008).
DESIGNING FROM THE MARGINS
No predefined criteria identify postcolonial
approaches in design. I see practice not
merely as an enactment of theory but also as
advancing postcolonial thinking in the
spatial realm. Most contemporary
practitioners of architecture and planning do
not make any explicit references to
postcolonial theory. Rather, they critique
accepted premises, cat- egories, and forms
arising from specific Western European and
North American expe- riences, and propose
alternative visions, processes, or narratives
of modernism. Such designers see
architecture as globally consti- tuted
engaging the interconnections between
‘locality’ and ‘globality’. They seek not
simply to take forms imagined elsewhere
and locate them in distant places with minor
adaptations but rather to renew and enrich
understandings of dominant tendencies from
the margins. They challenge the principles of
universal design by embracing ‘otherness’,
place, time, issues, and cultures rather than
ignoring or subordinating them to the
dominant paradigms of modernism.
 From the perspective of received canons
of architectural history, recognizing
important innovations and designers in other
locales is itself a huge step. Journals such as
Mimar have played a critical role in
privileging con- cerns such as low-cost
housing, and priorities such as materials,
technologies, climate, and cultural needs
different from those common in Western
Europe and North America. For instance,
Hasan-Uddin Khan and Sherban
Cantacuzino’s Charles Correa (1987), and
Brian Taylor’s Geoffrey Bawa (1995) have
contributed both to design knowledge and to
critical discussions by identifying impera-
tives and narratives that construct
modernism other than the dominant
universalist ones. The writings have helped
to document and globalize the work of
architects who other- wise might have been
considered totally embedded within their
national contexts. Looking at postcolonial
efforts to design from the margins in the last
two and a half decades, I see four key
themes as most sig- nificant: an emphasis on
the particularities of region, site, and
context; in-depth knowledge of a place and
people; social responsibility in design; and
sustainability.
One important postcolonial approach in
design is a response to the characteristics
of region, site, and context arguing for an
identity that was modern but particular to a
place. Deeply concerned about homogeniza-
tion, many architects around the world have
sought design solutions that are more spe-
cific and more appropriate to their context
and have contributed to richer, more local-
ized interpretations of modernism. Some,
such as Glenn Murcutt in responding
to Maori architecture, have modified and
developed vernacular spaces and building
practices. Others, such as Ken Yeang and
T.R. Hamzah, or William Lim have paid
spe- cial heed to climatic conditions and
investi- gated what modernism means in the
tropics. Still others, such as Balakrishna
Doshi and Charles Correa have offered
approaches to housing and street design that
are dynamic and progressive, drawing on
careful study of historic cities in India.
Their work has been
especially important in recognizing housing
and city building as social and economic
processes as much as form-making endeav-
ors. With professional training in Europe
and North America, these architects have
critically examined their positions as
‘outsid- ers’ to the communities they have
designed for and attempted to educate
themselves to be cultural ‘insiders.’
The Aga Khan Award for Architecture
has been notable for celebrating the appro-
priateness of contextual design (see also
Chapter 34). Currently on its eleventh cycle,
the award has recognized and encouraged
design innovation that has addressed prevail-
ing concerns in the Islamic world. Despite
numerous criticisms, the AKAAs have influ-
enced new generations of designers to
consider contextual and cultural relevance
of design rather than mimic those arising out
of the culture of the metropole or replicate
traditions without inquiry or improvement.
How architects gain knowledge about
the place they are designing in and how well
they know it is a crucial question. In contrast
to colonial architecture and planning inter-
ventions, and the increasing globalization of
architectural practices in recent years, some
designers have largely concentrated their
work on a single region and devoted them-
selves to responding to the central issues
arising there. Laurie Baker for instance,
spent over thirty-five years of his life in
India developing techniques of building with
bricks that were low cost, used simple
technology requiring minimal training, and
were climati- cally comfortable in a hot
humid climate. A French anthropologist,
Peter Dujarric drew on his studies of
Senegalese traditional motifs and crafts as
well as village architecture in the design of a
cultural centre, the Alliance Franco-
Senegalaise in Kaolack, that aimed to
celebrate and represent the essence of
Senegalese culture.
At once local and global, rationalizing,
improving, and modifying local technologies
has resulted in greater opportunities for
South–South flows of knowledge. Such
lateral exchanges challenge the singular
authority of Western Europe and North women with group loans for rebuilding their
America as the centres of innovation (see
homes.4 Their housing project won a World
also Chapter 13). For instance, Nader Khalili
Habitat award and, moreover, by
(1996) an Iranian-born architect, developed
recognizing the creditworthiness of a group
a type of shelter that could be built with
largely con- sidered invisible and incapable,
sandbags and barbed wire and that could be
it had helped to empower them. With the
used as emergency shelter in the event of a
idea of inculcat- ing pride and self-
disaster. This design for disaster housing has
sufficiency, Gawad Kalinga has assisted
been successfully used in Africa.
thousands of slum dwellers in the Phillipines
Another postcolonial approach to design to improve their living condi- tions with
has been to consider seriously social respon- brightly painted homes, beautiful parks and
sibility in design, with some viewing the playgrounds, colourful gardens, and clean
social process of design as important as the
surroundings.5
form of the final outcome. Challenging a
An increasingly important dimension of
dependent view of architecture as largely an
social responsibility in design is enhancing
artistic endeavour whose aesthetics are
sustainability. Although ‘sustainability’ is a
driven by principles derived from
term that is variously interpreted, it has gen-
movements origi- nating in Western Europe
erally been synonymous with green building
and North America, some architects have
and energy efficient technologies. Only
addressed the spatial and cultural needs of
recently have equity and diversity as com-
underprivileged com- munities. With an
plex, interconnected ambitions been at the
activist agenda, some design efforts have
forefront of design and planning.
focused on marginal localities with their
Postcolonial perspectives on sustainability
particular problems, and limitations as
challenge the universality of technology-
legitimate subjects of design. From the
dominated inno- vations rooted in the
provision of shelter for victims of natural
experiences and prac- tices in Europe and
disasters to refugee housing in conflict, from
North America. Capital-intensive
improving slum environments to providing
infrastructural services and building
improved infrastructure, design
technologies demand huge investments of
interventions, such as those of Architecture
both finance and technical know-how,
for Humanity (2006), have aimed at improv-
further reinforcing historical dependencies
ing people’s lives through community
and marginalities. Equally, postcolonial
design (see also Chapter 38). Eschewing the
thought, cognizant of the turbu- lent
conven- tional role of the autocratic expert,
influence of modernity and uneven
designers of this persuasion call attention to
globalization everywhere, rejects simplistic
the creative force of collaborative
assumptions about indigenous people
knowledge building and design.3
follow- ing timeless practices and living in
A postcolonial agenda in the community harmony with nature.
development projects is advanced by the
Minimalist interventions to rationalize,
emphasis on enabling, empowering, and
improve, and modify simple, local technolo-
partnering with the community so that resi-
gies and processes are to be preferred above
dents become active agents of
importing new systems from abroad. From
transformation rather than passive objects of
the perspective of enabling self-sufficiency,
improvement that only increases their
a simple and low-cost technology for a
dependency. Clearly such efforts have
scavenging-free two-pit pour-flush toilet for
conceived architecture as socially embedded
safe and hygienic on-site disposal is a valu-
processes more than com- pletely visualized
able contribution without high investment
forms. For instance, the Grameen Bank, a
in expensive underground drainage. Sulabh
microfinance organization in Bangladesh,
International has been remarkably successful
has succeeded in creating low- cost housing
in constructing such public toilets in cities
by entrusting impoverished rural
all over India.6 Collective design involving
marginalized groups has served to organize
and empower them, as well as develop solu-
tions that are likely to be sustained by them.
Mumbai-based SPARC has successfully
supported movements to organize slum
dwellers and pavement dwellers, especially
the women, to find collective solutions for
affordable housing and toilet facilities.7
Sustainable Urbanism International’s
(SUI) exploration of cultural sustainability
has included expanding the notion of herit-
age far beyond monuments to look at the
intersections of nature, culture, and built
environment.8 Their integrated view of sus-
tainability has highlighted the ways that
local knowledges, building practices, and
hydro- logical systems have been integral to
a cultural landscape. Identifying such
heritage has been a collaborative effort with
local residents that has helped them
recognize forms, practices, and skills they
have lost or are fast losing, and can help
generate liveli- hoods. Efforts to revive and
conserve historic lakes and wells, a heritage-
sensitive master- plan for cities to develop
on a compact model based on the built
forms and standards derived from historic
neighborhoods, and reviving and adapting
traditional technolo- gies of earth
construction for new structures all integrate
heritage conservation with design,
development planning, and natural resource
management.9 From the perspective that
these too are valuable resources, and that
each place needs to find its own version of
innovative architecture, SUI’s minimalist
design and planning interventions have
aimed to bring necessary improvements for
local economic development.
CONCLUSION
Far from being isolated artistic endeavours,
postcolonial thought has contributed to
inter- preting architecture and urban space as
cul- tural artifacts that are symbolic
landscapes constituted by layers of
meanings and identi- ties. As sites of
assertion, contestation, and
subversion of difference, built form and
space have been instrumental in reinforcing
and negotiating hierarchies and
relationships. Postcolonial perspectives
show the ways in which seemingly unique
and narrowly par- ticular forms and histories
are situated in global interconnections; and
forms and histo- ries presumed to be
universal, such as Western European
modernisms, are in fact provincial and
particular.
Above all, postcolonial theory is a way
of thinking about knowledge and power.
It has emphasized ways that knowledge
about the world is generated in specific rela-
tionships between those with power and
those without as a way to justify and
perpetu- ate those conditions of domination.
This chapter concludes not by summarizing
the status of postcolonial theory but rather
with the implications of adopting such a
perspec- tive in research and design. What
future directions does postcolonial thought
point to? Looking ahead, I see the
repercussions in architectural thinking and
design as fourfold.
First, thinking about architecture in an
expanded realm acknowledges intercon-
nections across time, space, and scales – as
well as inequities. As a symbolic landscape,
the significance of a single building extends
far beyond its site to the community, city,
and nation. Postcolonial thinking encourages
the questioning of established cultural cate-
gories, disciplinary boundaries, and hierar-
chies of control. With the new modernities
of globalization, new forms of dominance
and subordination, and inclusion and
exclusion, have emerged. The structures and
hierarchies of colonialism have morphed
into the new landscapes of globalization.
A postcolonial engagement in design has
prompted designers to challenge universal
paradigms of modernism. It prompts them
to sully accepted binaries like modern and
traditional; art and technology; craft and
globalization; heritage and development;
conservation and development; improviza-
tion and design; local and global; nature and
built form; and expert and community.
 Second, postcolonial thinking challenges
with multiplicity and hybridity the tyranny
of singular narratives of modernity. Rather,
it encourages alternative interpretations of
modernism and legitimizes other modern-
isms originating outside its canonized
loci. Rather than expect purity and
authentic- ity, postcolonial thought accepts
hybrids. By highlighting histories,
experiences, built environments, and people
invisible in the canonical histories,
postcolonial efforts have engaged with
dominant accounts. A postcolonial agenda
for design thinking involves as Gwendolyn
Wright (2002) has suggested, considering
the politics of space: ‘Comodernities’, as a
way of thinking about modernism that
allows for respectful dissent and plurality of
trajectories rather than a continued
acceptance of Western hierarchies alone.
The objective of post- colonial critique has
not been to reject the central narrative or to
replace it with another, equally singular and
authoritative history, but rather to expand,
enrich, and renew it from the margins.
Third, postcolonial perspectives alert us,
implicitly or explicitly, to the sources of
architectural knowledge. Particular treatises,
histories, and forms of Western Europe (and,
more recently, North America) have become
canonized as architectural knowledge.
Recognizing the relationship between
knowl- edge and power, postcolonial
thought legiti- mizes other architectural
knowledges. Giving voice to subordinate
struggles against the structures of hierarchy,
the legitimization of their experiences, has
been an express objec- tive. Beyond
considering Western Europe’s colonization
of Asia and Africa, the ordinary and
everyday architecture of prostitution houses
and flop houses or critical studies of race,
class, and gender, postcolonial perspec- tives
influence investigation of other types of
power relations using the idea of negotiating
power and identity rather than assuming
them to be given categories.
Finally, postcolonial inquiry in design
brings to centre stage a transformative
agenda for architectural and planning
interventions
seeing their objective as empowering and
enabling the ordinary and the marginalized
to reconsider their subjectivities as agents
of positive change and to renegotiate
their positions of relative powerlessness.
Considerations of sustainability of environ-
mental and cultural resources are central to
this view.
Postcolonial perspectives espouse a trans-
formative agenda for architecture and urban-
ism that enables and empowers multiplicity
in the processes of material production,
prac- tices of their inhabitation, and
structures of representation. The attempt to
break free of colonial hierarchies includes
investigating the colonial dimensions of
concepts like modernism, postmodernism,
tradition, herit- age, and sustainability – all
of which are rooted in Western European
experiences of modernity. Interrogating
difference demands an investigation into the
origins of the con- ceptual frameworks and
spatial categories that define the discipline.
Therein lies our future – and our hope – of a
more just and equitable world that demands
globalizing knowledge production in
architecture and planning.
NOTES
This chapter has benefitted enormously from the
comments and suggestions of Gwendolyn Wright, Hilde
Heynen, and Greig Crysler who read and re-read several
versions of the chapter. Anthony King also read an
earlier version of the chapter. I am very grateful to
them for giving so generously. Irene Urmeneta and
Damien Carriere ably assisted in compiling the
bibliography.
1 The term ‘subaltern’ was a term used by the
British to refer to junior officers in the army and liter-
ally means subordinate. The work of Eric Stokes, Eric
Hobsbawm, and James Scott was also influential here.
2 See www.pukar.org.in/
3 See for instance the special issue on alternative
architecture by Journal of Architectural Education,
May 2009.
4 See www.grameen-info.org/
5 See www.gk1world.org/
6 See www.sulabhinternational.org/
7 See www.sparcindia.org/
 8 See www.sustainurban.org/; www.arch.colum-
bia.edu/labs/sustainable-urbanism directed by Jyoti
Hosagrahar
9 See report, Sustainable Urbanism International. ‘Site
Management Plan for Sustainable Conservation and
Development of Hoysala Heritage Region’. 5-volume
Monograph to the Government of Karnataka, 2011.